Trust & provenance
Every page carries a quiet trust strip under its title — a read-only line telling you how much to lean on what you're reading. tela never writes these signals into the page; it computes them from data it already keeps (edit history, the activity log, the semantic index) and shows them where you read.
What the signals mean
| Signal | Looks like | What it tells you |
|---|---|---|
| Freshness | Updated 3 months ago (amber when old) | Time since the last edit. Turns to a warning past ~4 months, or past a review cadence the page declares (below). |
| Provenance | by alice · Agent-written · Synced | Who or what last touched it — a person, an AI agent (via MCP), or a file sync. A human edit after an agent flips it back to human. |
| Corroboration | 3 corroborating | How many other pages in the same space support the same thing. |
| Dispute | 1 may dispute this (red) | Same-space pages that appear to contradict this one. Click it for the conflicting pages and why each was flagged — this is how stale or conflicting docs surface. |
A whole space's disputes are collected under its Health tab, which lists every disputed page alongside likely duplicates and unlinked pages as a maintenance worklist.
Review cadence
To flag a page for review on a schedule, set a review_every_days property (page properties / frontmatter):
review_every_days: 90
Once the page is older than that many days since its last edit, freshness shows "review overdue" in amber. Unset, a page is only flagged at the general ~4-month (120-day) staleness mark.
How corroboration & disputes are computed
A background worker compares each page against its nearest pages in the same space (via the semantic index) and asks the model whether each corroborates, contradicts, or is unrelated. The result is cached and read instantly — the analysis never runs while you're reading, and only same-space pages are ever named, so a dispute can't reveal a page you can't access.
It refreshes itself: editing a page re-runs its check, and a periodic sweep re-checks pages whose neighbours changed — so disputes can appear or clear on a page you didn't touch.
Agents get it too
The same trust read goes to agents over MCP: get_page includes an epistemic block — freshness, provenance, corroboration vs. dispute (with the disputing pages). So an agent reading tela gets not just the text but how much to trust it, and can prefer fresh, corroborated, human-reviewed pages over stale or disputed ones. That's what makes tela usable as memory you can trust. See [[Agents & MCP]].
[!IMPORTANT] Corroboration/dispute and the auto-summaries both rely on an LLM + the semantic index. On the managed cloud these are provided; self-hosting, they run once you've configured a chat model + embedder. To keep the per-page corroboration pass off without disabling your LLM, set
TELA_AGREEMENT=0.
Related: [[Search & ask your docs]] · [[Graph view]] · [[Agents & MCP]]